A big difference: music fans have fewer guns, CD stampers than true pirates

Content owners know how to bring the heat on real, commercial pirates, but …

The RIAA faced the prospect of a class action lawsuit last week over the way it handles investigations and prosecutions of suspected file-sharers. If the association's goal was to embed its four letters into the brains of music-loving Americans, it has largely succeeded—even while stirring up levels of vitriol usually reserved for Microsoft, Sony, or Infinium Labs. But branding music lovers as "pirates" has only obscured the real division between those who download some tracks online and those who run commercial stamping operations complete with guns, bombs, and... stolen Greek and Roman pottery.

It's a shame that things have come to this, since the content creation industries have shown themselves to be capable of innovative thinking and investigation when it comes to breaking up real pirate operations. Take the MPAA as an example. This week, the group is bringing two black Labradors named Lucky and Flo back from Malaysia, where they have served for six months sniffing out pirated DVDs. The dogs were so successful that they were able to smell $6 million in illicit DVDs, VCDs, and equipment in just half a year. Not everyone believes that dogs really help, but the arrests are real.

In late July, the IFPI helped the First GdF Operational Unit of Catania crack down on a Sicilian distribution network. They turned up a few thousand discs, along with "a significant seizure of arms and bombs," including TNT. The pirates allegedly also had stolen bits of Greek and Roman pottery lying about.

IFPI experts also helped Indonesian police conduct a raid last Thursday that netted 125 stampers and 40,000 illicit discs. According the IFPI, the plant had been pumping out 110,000 discs a day for the last several months and had gone to some trouble to obscure the SID codes that can indicate the replication source. Also, last month the FBI worked in conjunction with software makers like Microsoft and Chinese officials to bust two software piracy rings with $500 million worth of pirated software.

Music labels, movie studios, and software development companies have all shown that they know how to work with law enforcement to get real piracy operations shut down. Note how different in scale and tactics the above groups are from Joe Q. Sixpack, who doesn't have ties to the Mob, containers filled with TNT, or industrial stampers that he's using for commercial gain.

If copyright holders want to pursue individual file-swappers, they have the right to do so, but there simply has to be a better way to curtail file-swapping than mass lawsuits that are pursued to the end against even the innocent. Noncommercial music downloaders are fans; pirates are not. There needs to be a clearer distinction between the two: a carrot for the fans, a big stick for the gun-wielding, stamper-owning pirates.